One of the most significant developments in the written word was the placing of a space after each word. Something you would not even think about today but it does make all the difference to the ease of reading. But the difference between what we don’t think about because it seems so natural, and when…
Tag: Language
Extending Speach
A few years ago a British magazine ran a brief and unscientific survey. They took two teenage boys, one who had left school early and one who was studying to go to university and asked them what law they would enact if they had the power. They both, in different ways, replied they would rather…
Language Is Not Always Meaning
Of course the creation of languages by animals is one of the immense evolutionary steps in the development of the earth-bound brain. I recall reading a bit about what it is for a sentence to be ‘true’ (correct) and how truth and meaning go hand-in-hand and have noted where people think we limit our understanding…
When A Word Is The World
Language changes. The factors in the change range from new words coming in from abroad and influxes of immigration giving new idioms and flavours, the natural propensity of the human brain to simplify spellings to match pronunciation and simple mistakes which by usage or disinterest in rules, become the new rules. Whatever the reasons without…
The United Kingdom
It is still a Kingdom, after a fashion, though the monarch doesn’t have people beheaded anymore they still anticipate the bowing. The Cornish who now do not differ genetically from their English cousins, still maintain a liberal tradition, the Welsh, descendants of the original inhabitants of the island, are penned up in some amazing small…
Watch Your Language
It is everywhere, the endemic use of language to support a particular world view. I thought about this seeing someone ask if China was the greatest threat to the USA. Look at that word. Threat. Loaded with menace. It is filled with visions of ‘yellow men’ pouring out of tunnels to invade the USA. Challenge…
The Temptation Of Language
Of course it has been said before, mostly notably in recent years in the playwrights of the Theatre Of The Absurd, that we find it difficult, not easy to convey meaning when we talk and write, because the same word has nuances of meaning for other people they do not have for us. Equally, the…
Language
There is something insistent in our need to communicate. An endless desire to be understood. And languages reflect our needs and desires starting off being quite small and growing as we grow, like flowers opening their petals as the sun rises. Many years ago they started looking closely at philology in Europe and the ways…
Mobile History
Human beings love to communicate. It will be one of the great discoveries to find out which came first the voice or the brain. Through stele, scrolls and printing presses to the internet, telephone and radio phone we will develop our ability to communicate easily with each other anywhere in the world and one day…